On October 4, 2015, the Committee for Green Foothills honored Bay Nature co-founders David Loeb and Malcolm Margolin (publisher of Heyday Books) for their significant contributions to the Bay Area nature community.

After years working in office buildings, marketing executive Corinne DeBra was ready to get outside - and get outside she did! In 2009 she launched a walk around the entire perimeter of San Francisco Bay - logging 1,000 miles. Two years later, she decided to do it again.

Each year, Bay Nature Institute honors several individuals who are making outstanding contributions to the understanding and stewardship of the natural world of the Bay Area. Here are this year's winners.

Janet McBride has spent the past 13 years championing the two region-wide trails that encircle the Bay Area, making her one of our great unsung heroes of human-powered outdoor recreation in the Bay Area.

Butterflies fluttering through the Mission, mice nibbling their way down Sansome, pelicans gliding up Geary. Starting today and tomorrow, four MUNI buses will make a splash with Endangered Species, an art project that has redesigned buses with photographic murals of endangered or threatened species who live around San Francisco.

In spring 2010, Bay Nature teamed up with Sarber's Cameras on a photo contest featuring images of people in the natural places they love. Dozens of local photographers submitted hundreds of photos. Check out the winners!

Though California brown pelicans are the smallest of all pelicans, they are still very impressive birds, with wingspans occasionally as big as eight feet. Nearly driven to extinction by DDT, they've made a comeback but are now threatened by mysterious harmful algae blooms.

Along the coast of Northern California, nearly every stream and creek once had its own migratory population of coho salmon. Their return each winter, once as reliable as the next train or bus, now happens in fewer and fewer places each year. Where the fish do return, it's often thanks to dedicated volunteers working to keep creeks healthy enough for our region's most charismatic nomads.

If you're lucky some spring day in a few small patches of land near San Francisco, you may catch the glint of a male mission blue butterfly's iridescent wings. If you are so fortunate, thank the determined conservationists who've been working to protect a small butterfly from big threats.

Imagine a time when buses and streetcars and trains are everywhere in San Francisco, when everyone takes transit and almost no one owns a private car. This was close to reality just 70 years ago. Since then the urban ecosystem has changed, and buses were outcompeted by private cars. Today, though, that urban ecosystem might be changing again.

Every once in a while, a small and unremarkable animal makes a huge impact on a landscape. So it is with the salt marsh harvest mouse around the edges of the San Francisco Bay. The endangered species status of the harvest mouse, along with that of the California clapper rail, has been a prime mover in the restoration of thousands of acres of tidal marshes around the region.

Reptile expert Robert Stebbins calls the San Francisco garter snake "one of the most beautiful serpents in North America." The snake's dazzling patterns of color serve as camouflage in its native habitat: the open marshes, stream banks, grasslands, and vernal pools of the San Francisco Peninsula. But the best camouflage is little help if your home territory gets built over.

On October 3, 1995, a wildfire erupted on Mount Vision at Point Reyes National Seashore. Before the flames were extinguished a week later, 12,000 acres of this popular park had been scorched, and 45 nearby homes burned to the ground. A decade later, we return to Point Reyes for a lesson in local fire ecology to see how the landscape—and the community—were reshaped and renewed by the blaze.